12.12.06

Hey, take a break from grading.

Postgraduate OfficeA lonely, narrow room, with desks arranged in rows that remind you of battery farming. Yellowing printouts of Piled Higher and Deeper peel from the walls, and in the distance you can hear the faint sound of undergraduate feet tramping into an exam room.

There is an endless stack of essays in front of you.

>pick up stackYou really don't want to do that.

>make coffeeYou move towards the other end of the office, view the Thing growing out of the kettle, and scuttle back to the safety of your desk.

>look at stackIt's not getting any smaller.

>pick up essayYou lift one essay off the pile.

>read essayWith trepidation, you lift aside the cover sheet. Suddenly, the world around you seems to melt away...

HellYou are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has turned into a heavy, erratic thwump - swoop - THWUMP you recognise immediately - it's a badly-indented long quotation, and it's coming closer.

"So, ultimately, in order to understand nature it may be necessary to have a deeper understanding of mathematical relationships. But the real reason is that the subject is enjoyable, and although we humans cut nature up in different ways, and we have different courses in different departments, such compartmentalization is really artificial, and we should take our intellectual pleasures where we find them."